A question about "ssconvert" and safety from macro viruses

[Helge Hafting <helge hafting hist no>]

The "ssconvert" utility can convert gnumeric, openoffice and excel 
spreadsheets to latex.

But is this conversion safe in case of macro viruses? At least excel can 
have those, I don't know about the other two.


I plan on using this to implement spreadsheet import in the LyX document 
processor. But this will be allowed *only* if there is a guarantee that 
"ssconvert" can be used safely.

So I wonder: Will ssconvert merely read the spreadsheet and output some 
latex code, or are there cases where it will also execute script code 
embedded in the spreadsheet?

In the latter case, is there a way of avoiding this, such as using
options for suppressing such scripts.


I do not worry about ssconvert doing math calculation, the problem is 
script/macro languages capable of reading/writing arbitrary files, or 
even executing arbitrary binaries. Such things makes it possible to 
propagate a macro virus, a capability that is not allowed.

Helge Hafting